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Monday, March 14, 2011

Personal Genealogy Day

After weeks of writing my special project, handling client requests and more, I finally took a personal genealogy day on Friday. It was a much needed change of scenery.

I worked on my fabulously awesome, fully-sourced database. For the new readers, I started building a genealogy database from scratch in 2009. The only rule was that every fact or person I added had to have a source and citation attached to it. The work has been slow going, but it is worth it.

On Friday I worked on adding the Charles Neilson Jones family. He is the brother of my great-great grandfather, Frank Wiley Jones. While my Frank married a Chickasaw and moseyed up to Oklahoma, Charles raised a family in Cooke County, Texas. He spent so much time there that he wrote a book about it: Early Days in Cooke, Texas 1848-1873.

Here's a picture of Charles:

He looks a lot like his brother Frank, don't you think?

Charles and his wife had 10 kids. I spent most of this weekend adding facts about them to my database.

Know what I like best about this timeline? All those checkmarks on the right.

That means that there is a source for each and every fact for Charles Jones in my database. It is a good feeling.

Since Charles had 10 kids and it takes a while to add facts and sources for each child, I'm not even halfway through getting all these people fully represented in my database. But at least it's a start.

Charles even has a prominent grandchild worthy of note. I spent an hour just reading about her on the Internet. Who is she? Well she deserves her own post so you'll just have to wait and see.

11 comments:

Woohoo! Cooke Co., Texas! My great grandfather's uncles lived there in the 1880s through the early 1900s. It's on my list as a place to visit. I'm curious about a letter about one of them, he was a rock mason and the letter said he built "concrete cellars" and they were a monument to him as they could be seen all over the area and that there was one in the writer's yard. (Gainesville 1961). Hmmmm..concrete cellars. Sounds interesting...sorta.

Lisa, a concrete cellar would be very important here in tornado county (I'm a ways south of Gainesville, but you can see similar tornado cellars here in Granbury too). Amy, I'm so looking forward to your post about the famous grandchild!

Amy, I too am starting a new database. I wasn't happy with the conversion from Family Tree maker 6 to 2011. So I am learning the new program bye building the new database. Sources are just time consuming. I am still doing the research but in the old program for awhile until I get better at it. Thanks for your blog.

Awesome! I'm impressed at all the events you have for him. I think I finally accomplished getting my bro-in-law's family all properly sourced in my start-over-from-scratch database this weekend. I will be so happy when I have everyone migrated over from my old FamilyTreeMaker file.

When six of us gathered to began our Gen Society here in Sumner Co., KS, we learned that four of us had Hartford, CT founders for ancestors, and later, one woman and I learned that our ancestors had witnessed each other's wills. Wow! What is it they say, six degrees of separation...